​Hi Everyone, a little while back I made a video explaining that you don’t have to work from your imagination as an artist. Now I’m making a video about why you might want to anyway. There are three reasons I can think of and I’m going to go over them right now.

Reason number one:To express your emotions. Now, I’m not just talking about abstract art, even though that’s probably what comes to most people’s minds when they hear about using art to express your emotions. The truth is when you paint without being able to see the colors and shapes of the actual thing you’re painting, it’s much easier, almost automatic, to let your emotions to come through in the piece. A prime example of a person who did this is Van Gogh. The Smart Art Box channel made a video on this. Anyway, when Van Gogh painted his famous “Starry, Starry Night”, he was locked in a mental hospital and so, since he wasn’t able to actually look at the night sky, he had to do the painting entirely from memory. As a result, his inner turmoil came through. If you have any emotions, particularly negative emotions , that need to come out and you don’t feel like you can express them in words, painting without reference can be a good vehicle.

​Reason number two:To stretch your creative muscle. I don’t think this reason really requires an explanation. Of course, if you’re working without reference, you’re forced to get more creative, since you don’t have anything to copy.

And finally reason number three:To find out what you need to work on. I heard Happy D Artist talk about this in her video on drawing without reference. When you draw only from your mind, you really learn what you know and don’t know about how something looks. For example, if you draw faces from your imagination and all your mouths come out wonderful, but your noses come out kind of, meh, well you probably need to work more on noses, but you have a pretty good grasp of mouths.

​I personally don’t have much experience working from my imagination, but I’d like to start doing it every once in a while.